What are the advantages of home-brewed beer?

If you’re interesting in becoming a craft brewer but are sitting on the fence, maybe these benefits will convince you to join the home brew movement. Let’s get right to it! Here are eight benefits of brewing your own beer.

Make amazing beer

Your beer is hand crafted, and if you’re already thinking of becoming a brewer, chances are you care deeply about the quality of your beer. It’s that care that will help you brew spectacular beers.  You can use ingredients that commercial brewers simply can’t because you don’t have to worry about mass production, or making recipes that will sell to a large enough customer base. You can brew the beer you want to taste, regardless of how many different types of ingredients you want to use.

Save some money

While I certainly don’t advocate you get into home brewing strictly to save money (you should get into it because you love craft beer), it’s certainly an added perk. You can often brew beer at half the price you would pay for commercial beer. Of course, if you’re packing your beer with exotic and expensive ingredients, the math might not work out that well; but in general, you come out way ahead when home brewing AND you get better beer. It’s pretty much a win-win.

Greater amount of freedom and variety

You can tinker with a recipe to your heart’s content, until you get it just right. Do you have a crazy idea for a beer? Go go for it! You can go beyond the limits of commercial beer and explore all types of beer styles, or experiment with different flavours and techniques. Pushing boundaries can be lots of fun. and a great way to learn more about beer.

DEGONG home-brew equipment for sale

You Don’t need much equipment to get started

I’m a big advocate of starting with small-batch 50L brewing  when getting started. You don;t need much gear. You really only need a brewhouse, a fermenter and sanitizer solution. Sure you can add bells and whistles over time, but you can get started with these bare-bones items to get a feel for it.

You Don’t need much time

As with all things, your first couple batches may take more time than usual, as you familiarize yourself with the brewing process, but once you get there, brewing doesn’t take a whole lot of time. I brew every other Wednesday night, which lets me bottle the previous batch on the same day. This means I have cut down the entire mash, brewing, and bottling process down to three hours, total. And that’s assuming I only focus on brewing. I often multi-task during brew day, as I don’t need to be at the stove for the entire mash or the entire boil.

You’ll discover a whole new community of passionate brewers

As you’ll soon discover, home brewing can be quite the social hobby. It’s amazing how many friends and family have grown curious about my hobby – they always want to taste my latest experiments, or ask that I serve one of my own beers at dinner instead of the commercial craft beer I planned for the meal!

Enjoy the benefits of ‘live’ beer.

Most commercial beers are pasteurized, which means that the beer has been cooked and doesn’t contain live yeasts like home brewers do. We welcome live yeast in our beer! Yeasts add vitamin B, which helps prevent hangovers for those times you may have splurged on your own beer.  Vitamin B is good for your liver, so drink up the live beer!

And yes, enjoy the health benefits of beer.

As with all things in life, moderation is important. Beer, in moderation is good for your health. Overdue it, and you’re body will hate you for it. Beer contains lots of nutrients: finer, folate, vitamin B, and anti-oxidants, among others. Researchers in the U.S. and Europe have found that we’re 30% less likely to suffer from a stroke, heart attack or heart disease if we drink one pint of beer per day. That’s because b-vitamins and phytonutrients available in unfiltered beer is good for the heart.

Happy Brewing!